Classrooms With 500,000 Students
I am fascinated by the Stanford online courses in machine learning and artificial intelligence. My first inkling of them came when quite a few of my students started taking the artificial-intelligence class. Olin is very small, only about 400 students, so I realized that these online courses must be large. But I almost fell over when I saw that enrollment varied from 66,000, at the low-end, to 160,000.
Sebastian Thrun, who co-taught the artificial-intelligence course to 160,000 students, is now leaving Stanford teaching in order to teach courses to 500,000 students for free. What an inspiring goal! Read More »
Seal Training or Learning?
Yesterday I got a short and sweet insight into learning, courtesy of the New England Aquarium, where I took our daughters for our weekly visit. One of our favorite exhibits is the training session for the sea lions and fur seals. In the audience this time were about 100 school children with parents and teachers. To introduce the session, the lead trainer conducted the following discussion:
How many of you do chores? (Many hands go up.)
How many of you get an allowance for doing chores? (Most hands remain in the air.)
How many of do homework?
I see lots of hands! It makes homework not so bad because you get a reward at the end. Read More »
Listen Carefully as Our Menu Options Have Recently Changed
Moving houses has always been like having three teeth removed without anesthetic. These days the pain is accentuated by having to wait on the phone hearing, “Please listen carefully as our menu options have recently changed.” That’s corporate-speak for, “Don’t even bother pressing zero hoping to speak to a human. That’ll just put you back at the beginning.”
My latest such adventure started with an email from the phone company (Verizon). I was told that a technician would come to hook up our new service during the time “window” of 8 a.m. to 5 p.m. If a window is an opening in a wall, then 8 am to 5 p.m. is more like the whole wall. Trying to shrink the window, I spent more than an hour on hold for one person after another who could only forward me to someone else equally unhelpful. The circular chain of authority finally snapped when the last person claimed (all this discussion is at 10 a.m. on the day itself) “We have absolutely no way to reach the technician.” And then asked “Have I provided excellent service today?” Read More »
Addition Is Useless, Multiplication Is King: Channeling Our Inner Logarithm
TIME magazine has been running a series called “Brilliant: The science of smart” by Annie Murphy Paul. The latest column, “Why Guessing Is Undervalued,” quoted several results from research on learning estimation, a topic near to my heart. One result surprised me particularly:
…good estimators possess a clear mental number line — one in which numbers are evenly spaced, or linear, rather than a logarithmic one in which numbers crowd closer together as they get bigger. Most schoolchildren start out with the latter understanding, shedding it as they grow more experienced with numbers.
I do agree that children start out with a logarithmic understanding. I first learned this idea from a wonderful episode of WNYC’s Radio Lab on “Innate numbers” (Nov. 30, 2009). The producers had asked Stanislas Dehaene to discuss his research on innate number perception.
One of his studies involved an Indian tribe in the Amazon. This tribe does not have words for numbers beyond five, and does not have formal teaching of arithmetic. Read More »
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